I'm Lynn Von Thaden and I'm a board certified behavior analyst for Brett
DiNovi and associates one of the greatest challenges for a BCBA is ensuring that
your intervention plan is being developed as you've prescribed you're
likely responsible for training many direct service professionals such as
registered behavior technicians it may also fall underneath your scope to train
other professionals and parents as well in order to determine that your
intervention is successful and that a functional relation has been established
you must first ensure that your treatment plan is being implemented with
procedural fidelity this addresses bacb task list k05 design and use systems for
monitoring procedural integrity procedural fidelity or treatment
integrity is defined as the extent to which the independent variable is
applied exactly as planned and described and no other unplanned variables are
administered inadvertently along with the planned treatment if procedural
fidelity has not been established it's likely that your data is not being
collected reliably as well if an analyst observes poor or no trends in behavior
they may make changes to the intervention prematurely additionally a
false positive or data that's yielding the correct or consistent change in
behavior may be a result of a confounding variable and be difficult to
replicate despite its importance a large percentage of peer-reviewed articles do
not include their procedures for assessing for procedural integrity so
what are a few strategies that you can pair with your feedback in training
procedures to ensure the likelihood that your plans are being implemented with
integrity design an intensive training package there is significant research to
suggest that sharing the procedural checklist or data form that will be used
to assess the integrity of your treatment benefits the future result of
those checks that is designing your procedural
fidelity data collection and training package together is likely to ensure
that they will be compatible in creating consistency moving forward provide ample
opportunities to train on that procedure such as direct instruction modeling and
feedback continue with regular procedural checks there are no hard and
fast rules on how often procedural data should be collected however if your
implementer has yet to meet mastery criteria training and confirmation of
integrity should be collected at any appropriate observation time
additionally factors that may affect consistent implementation over time such
as procedural drift or experimenter bias should encourage checks throughout later
phases of your implementation as well if your previously effective intervention
is now yielding less than effective data it's important to do your procedural
check first now that we have some guidelines or helpful tools to improve
fidelity let's review a few formal ways and out-of-the-box measures for
treatment integrity self monitoring checklists
in this study by plasmic at all they provided their staff members with pre
training training and feedback conditions prior to the implementation
of a token economy during the fidelity phase staff were instructed to implement
the token system at various times throughout the day and complete a
self-monitoring checklist of those procedures twice at any implementation
period the documentation would then be left for the experimenter to collect
following the observations the results of the experiment showed that integrity
of 80 percent or higher was not achieved by training alone but the process of
completing the checklist improved the performance of all staff members to the
predetermined success rates self-monitoring checklists are a great
way to reduce the response effort if you lack the opportunity to provide more
direct supervision while still ensuring that your treatment integrity will
increase video self-monitoring checklists several additional studies
have encouraged a similar procedure where you have a staff review their
performance and self monitor using video recording here Belfiore at all were
increasing consistent implementation of discrete trial instruction or DTI they
relied on the staff reviewing their performance on a video post
implementation and then taking data on their performance to increase their
ability to consistently deliver the treatment package data yielded quick and
reliable results confirmed through inter observer agreement whether using self
monitoring or video self monitoring it's important that we design of these
treatment integrity packages ahead of time as a proactive measure to ensure
that our training and feedback will be as effective as it can help us spread
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